Our Kerr biography has a (tentative) title!

Found out the other day that one of the titles in the running for the GHK biography has been approved by the sponsor of the book, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. The tentative title is  《葛超智傳記：亞洲、冷戰與一段未竟之志》 (roughly, George H. Kerr: Asia, the Cold War, and an Unfulfilled Ambition), and it should be coming out early next year. More details when I know more!

New school year's resolutions?

I was going to write up my resolutions for the new academic year as I've done in the past, but I noticed that last year I didn't really make any resolutions besides the idea (or fantasy) of getting more sleep. Maybe I should have specified that I should do that sleeping at night rather than taking long naps in the middle of the day.

I also came across this article from Jessi Gold, a wellness officer and professor of psychiatry. She suggests, among other things, that you should "consider words or values" instead of resolutions. This way you're not making specific but impossible-to-keep resolutions like "read a book a week" or something like that but rather suggesting "an intention."

So I'm going to go with a word or value for this year that I'd like to keep in mind. One of the things that I got from rereading my dissertation in preparation for the Shansi roundtable this past summer was the reminder about how enthusiastic the Shansi Reps were in the classroom. I think that with a few exceptions, it has been more difficult for me lately to maintain (or even start with) enthusiasm when I'm teaching. Whether it's just regular burnout or a combination of that, the current political and institutional climates, and the rise of GenAI, it's harder for me to look forward to the new academic year with a positive outlook. And if I'm not enthusiastic, how can I expect students to be enthusiastic? 

So I'm going to try to keep the word "enthusiasm" in mind this academic year. 

Four new books in the former native speaker's library

I got a collection of four small illustrated books about old Taichung, 《臺中舊城》, which includes 

• 「宮原武熊的一天」(about Miyahara Takekuma, a Japanese ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in Taichung),  
• 「和平日報：二七部隊」(about the Taichung-based newspaper I've been combing through for my research on 蔡鐵城),
• 「臺中公園-前世今生」(about Taichung Park), and 
• 「1960's 綠川點點滴滴的日子」(about the cleaning up of the Lü Chuan [Green River] in downtown Taichung).

These books also have maps of old Taichung that I guess you can use to find the places discussed. Wish I had time this trip to visit Taichung and take a look at those historical sites.

 

From their website, 臺中舊城生活博物館, it appears that they've published other books about Taichung, too. 

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Writing from Taipei now. It is miserably hot and humid, but I walked (walked!) the 1.1 km (OK, I'm a wimp to complain!) to 唐山書店 (and now I see that they have a website and I could have just ordered from it...). I bought one book I had planned to get and another that I discovered there.

呂東熹，《二二八記者劫》，玉山社，2016.

This book has a chapter about the Ho-p'ing Jih-pao (和平日報) newspaper that Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng wrote for before 228. Part of that chapter is about Ts'ai himself; I've already read it online, but I want to read the rest of the chapter (and the whole book) for context about journalists and newspapers during that period. 

徐秀慧，《戰後初期（1945-1949）台灣的文化場域與文學思潮》，稻鄉出版社，2007.

The title interested me, and I saw some footnotes mentioned the 和平日報, so I decided to buy it.

Still have some more books to buy in the coming weeks. Gotta pace myself... 

New ebook in the former native speaker's library

Just downloaded Evan Dawley's new book Taiwan: A People's History to my phone (the print copy isn't available yet). Hopefully, I'll be able to read it on my flight to Taiwan (tomorrow!). I'm looking forward to it.

Here's an interview with Dawley about the book:

Revisiting my dissertation

As I have mentioned a couple of times, I'm going to be participating in a roundtable on the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association in China and Taiwan. I got an email early this morning that suggested that we are supposed to submit our presentation materials by July 5, which was a bit of a surprise. But I happened to have time today to do some work on it. So I woke up and got going on it. 

The actual presentation (which I haven't done much of even now!) is only supposed to be five minutes long, but I also want to be ready for the roundtable discussion. We have worked up some questions that we'll discuss, so I spent the day going through them and drafting some responses. Doing that required me to read through parts of my dissertation and some of my dissertation notes from 15+ years ago. Some people have told me that they're horrified when they try to reread their dissertations, but I don't feel that way. Oh, there are some cringey places in it, and I've found more typos than I care to think about, but generally reading through it is a pleasurable experience. (As I told my brother, I think it's because my dissertation is so full of quotations of people who are smarter than I am!) 

Reading the dissertation also brings back memories of the process of writing it, which was also (generally speaking) enjoyable. I have heard people talk about how their dissertation process was painful, and I'm sure there were painful aspects to mine, but I actually enjoyed reading and studying the archival documents, interviewing former Shansi reps, and putting it all together.* It wasn't all roses and cheese (to borrow my 11-year-old's phrase--don't ask me what it means!), but maybe because I took so long to write it (9+ years), I had time to "live" with the documents and the interviews and use them to sort of create a virtual Oberlin Shansi world in my mind. Rereading my dissertation brings all of the experience back to mind. It also allows me to make connections between what I knew then and what I have learned since then about Taiwan and about US-Taiwan relations through my work on George Kerr. I think the continued learning and making these connections is something that keeps me alive and keeps my few remaining brain cells working!

*Though it got a little scary when I started having dreams about Nicolas Cage helping me with it...

Summer activities

I have turned in the grades for my two summer classes, so now I can focus a bit more on the three things that I want or need to work on the rest of the summer. A little update:

• Introduction to Rhetoric. I've got readings and a general schedule of activities mapped out, but there are still a few blanks to fill in. I'm meeting with the regular instructor next Thursday on Friday so we can talk over my plans for the course. I'm going in a bit of different direction from the one she takes, but she's OK with that, and there aren't any strict departmental expectations for what students should cover in the class. (Obviously it has to be an introduction to rhetoric, though!) I've been adapting what I did for the "Rhetorics in Contact" course that I taught a couple of years ago. I'm not doing a heavy focus on archival research this time around, though (too many students to take to the archives this time). I'm also planning to bring a lot more reflection into the course by ending it with a reflective portfolio project rather than a big essay.
• Academia Sinica conference. I started a PPT (Google Slides) for this, which I'll fill with mostly images (I don't like slide presentations that are text-heavy, though once in a while I fall into that trap). One thing that has been troubling me about this is that my prepared remarks are supposed to be only 5 minutes max. Not sure what I can say in 5 minutes. ("5 minutes" always reminds me of this 1980s-era Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza ad, which I mostly remember because the woman in it reminds me of my cousin's ex-girlfriend...)*
• Ts'ai T'ieh-ch'eng (蔡鐵城) project. Am "scraping" all I can find about him from various archival websites. (By the way, this website from the 國立公共資訊圖書館 is really cool! Tons of digitized old newspapers, Japanese era books, etc. I'm probably the last person in the world to find it, but in case I'm not, here's the link.) Am realizing how big and difficult a project this will be for me, but I'm realizing that I need to keep in mind what I was telling my students last year about the need to be patient and go slowly. I'm working with all sorts of materials and technologies (like the website above) that makes this research, but a lot of this just takes old-fashioned patience, planning, and ... (I need another word that starts with "p"--"persistence"?).

BTW, the GHK book is at the publisher getting proofread. When I know its publication date, I'll post it here.

* OK, now I want to have pizza for lunch...

"We walk around assuming we're a single author..."

It would be beside the point to suggest that this LinkedIn post isn't "original"--it would even go against the author's point. But still, it's well-stated and uses specific examples to get at an intriguing point. And I just like it.